Thursday, January 18, 2018

The Times Ireland edition led yesterday with a story about an (unnamed) Irish anti-abortion campaign group that has hired a company called Kanto to handle the digital side of things once the campaigning starts.

Kanto was founded by one Thomas Borwick, who describes himself as the Chief Technology Officer of the Vote Leave Brexit campaign, and the story goes on to speculate that, because of the tactics used in the Brexit campaign, the hiring of Kanto and Mr Borwick “will raise fears about the Eighth Amendment referendum.”

Maybe. Maybe not.

The definitive book of the Brexit campaign is All-Out War, written by Tim Shipman, chief political correspondent of the Times’s sister paper, the Sunday Times. It’s 662 pages of small type in paperback, 26 of which are a fairly comprehensive index. Neither Thomas Borwick nor Kanto are mentioned anywhere in those 26 pages.

Shipman identifies Vote Leave’s digital campaign as a key part of the shock victory. On pages 414 to 419 of his very readable book, Shipman identifies the key players – Henry de Zoete, digital director. Zack Massingham, of a Canadian social media company called AggregateIQ.

And there were three astrophysicists from the west coast of the USA who were brought in to crunch numbers in the same manner Wall Street hired physicists to construct models to persuade people to invest in subprime mortgages before August, 2008. We can’t be sure, but it’s unlikely that Thomas Borwick was one of those astrophysicists.

A quick Google revealed some, but not very many, references to Borwick as CTO of Vote Leave, most notably a piece by Carol Cadwalladr in the Guardian. And the man himself is not sparing in singing his own praises on his LinkedIn page with regard to his work with Vote Leave: “I have gone through the process of everything from wire framing websites to daily scrum meetings and planning our central database system for 43 million voters and maintaining an 80 user computer system.”

Just below the Experience section in LinkedIn, as the great world knows, is the Skills section. The specific computer skills Borwick lists are Microsoft Office, Microsoft Excel and HTML. Quite a modest list for the Chief Technology Officer of a system sitting on a 43-million-row database that was used to create the biggest political upheaval in Great Britain since the Glorious Revolution of 1689.

Your correspondent has no fears for Thomas Borwick’s PR career. Borwick’s father is Jamie Borwick, 5th Baron Borwick, and his mother, Victoria Lorne Peta Borwick, Baroness Borwick, is a former Deputy Mayor of London and MP for Kensington. The family have a coat of arms – three bears’ heads, a row of three eight-pointed-stars, all on a white background. One imagines even the haughty Lannisters sitting up and taking notice.

What this means is the man has contacts. If you hire Kanto, you get access right into the ventricles of the beating heart of the British establishment. What you may be less likely to get is the sort of computer savant that the unnamed Irish anti-abortion group may be expecting. Whoever that anti-abortion group is, it is to be hoped they kept the receipt.